Lith's mind immediately went to Soluspedia, accessing the contents of Professor Rudd's book to assess how serious was their predicament.
"What the heck is going on?" Friya was never far away from Quylla.
"All the failed dimensional spells have made the space in the class unstable." Quylla beat Lith on time, explaining the root of the matter.
"Normally it would never happen, since space reconfigures itself after a while. But because in a short time frame, hundreds, if not thousands of spells have been cast, order turned into chaos, making it possible.
The badly folded space wants to revert to normal, but it's too crumpled. Different spells are still lingering in the air, interacting together. If it keeps up like this, the whole training hall will turn into a huge fireball."
"What? Can't you dumb it down for me?" Like anyone without Soluspedia, Friya was still at the basics, completely oblivious that over bending space was like lighting a match in a coal mine.
"Don't cross the streams!" Lith blurted out.
"What streams?" Quylla looked at him with a puzzled expression.
"I mean… Friya, opening a Warp Steps is like folding a piece of paper. Two extremities separated in space can temporarily overlap, before going back to normal, like a spring.
What's happening is that multiple pieces of paper are colliding between them, but since it's not paper but energy, it will explode!"
"That's why dimensional magic is taught only in academies." Quylla chimed in.
"All the training halls have specific protective arrays, to prevents things like this from occurring. Students are bound to mess up, especially on difficult subjects. But according to Professor Rudd, they must have been turned off!"
Right after saving the dumb student from his own idiocy, Rudd took out his communication amulet to call for help. Only then he realised that using a dimensional spell hadn't been his brightest moment.
New cracks started to appear in the points he had Blinked through, spreading to the nearest ones until they formed a rough circle.
Inwardly cursing, Rudd threw the amulet to the closest student. Then he focused all his attention attempting to fix his mistake, that was about to generate a black hole big enough to destroy the training hall if not the whole academy.
"Rudd, unless this is important, I'd like to postpone." Linjos' image appeared from the amulet. He seemed to be swamped in paperwork, his usually tidy desk had turned into a battlefield.
"I'm not Professor Rudd, Headmaster." The student managed to say despite quite some stuttering.
"Who are you and how you managed to fake his call? Impersonating a Professor is a criminal offense, young man." Hearing a squeaky voice, Linjos finally raised his head, realizing something was off.
"I'm not impersonating anyone!" He squealed.
"The Professor gave it to me because…"
"Because?" The student had no idea what was happening or how to describe it.
"Because we need help! Cracks in the air, explosions and something about not wearing protections!"
"What?!" Linjos could not make head or tails of it.
"Give me that, you dimwit!" Lith used a mix of air and spirit magic to rip the amulet off his sweaty hands, explaining everything properly to the Headmaster.
Linjos turned pale, but reacted promptly.
"I can reactivate the protections from my office, but that will not help with your situation. Has any of you already learned Restoration?"
It was an advanced dimensional magic spell, developed exactly for situations like that. It was capable of restoring the natural order of things, dispersing the accumulated energy safely.
Linjos' eyes were actually fixated on Lith. He had proved to be excellent in everything, and that gave Linjos the hope he could pull another of his miracles.
"No." Lith replied. He knew the spell only because the book was in Soluspedia, but he had never tried it before. There was no chance Lith could manage to do it at the first try. With his luck, it would have made everything worse.
"Yes." Quylla's voice took everyone by surprise.
"Good! Then use it to assist Rudd. Help is already on its way, but because of the situation, we cannot risk using Warp Steps. It will take some time to arrive there, even by flying."
As soon the conversation ended, they regrouped with the others, deciding what to do. The students close to the exit had already run away, but the ever-expanding cracks and their explosions had now trapped all the others inside.
Only about half the class was still present, along with Professor Rudd, and things were getting worse by the second. Despite all his talent, he was only a man. There were too many sections of space about to collapse, he hadn't the time to properly stabilize them.
The best he could do alone, was temporarily fix the most dangerous one before moving to the next, but after a while the patch would collapse, forcing him to cycle between cracks.
Quylla proceeded to close the smaller ones, preventing them to grow and relieving Rudd, albeit a little. She had learned Restoration because the group would always use her room for training in dimensional magic.
Already having so little of her own, she was scared of losing them, so she had practiced it after everyone left for the night, further developing her mana sensibility by feeling the small damage their practice had caused over time.
Lith felt helpless. For the first time in his life, he could only watch and do nothing.
"Let me guess, our friend Lukart has already escaped."
"Indeed." Yurial nodded. "He and his goons were the first to get out. Either they have great reflexes…"
"Or they knew." Lith completed for him. He then used Life Vision to check his surroundings, discovering that visible and invisibles cracks had almost filled the training hall.
Swallowing a lump of saliva, he racked his brain trying to find a way to make himself useful.
Suddenly, Life Vison showed him that the spatial crack that Quylla was fixing had turned white hot, albeit the change was unnoticeable at the naked eye.
Reacting as fast as he could, Lith managed to shield her with his body before the explosion, conjuring at the same time a series of concentric barriers made of darkness, air and water.
From his fight with the Wither, he had learned that dark magic barriers, despite not blocking all the damage, would wear away everything. As expected, the dark layer reduced the strength of the impact, the air one blocked part of the shockwave, while the water layer smothered some of the flames.
The remaining damage was enough to riddle the back of Lith's uniform with holes, burning his skin and hair.
"Oh gods! I'm so sorry, it's all my fault!" Quylla's eyes filled with tears, but Lith stopped her, putting his index finger on her lips.
"No time for that! As long as I'm alive, we can regenerate everything. What's just happened?" He tried to act though, but he was now quite pale, his skin stretched from the waves of pain.
Luckily, both Friya and Yurial moved forward, one healing Lith, the other supplying him with energy to withstand the process without fainting.
"I've never used Restoration on distortions that big. I used the smaller ones to practice, but it seems I'm not good enough. There's only so much energy I manage to dissipate with my spell, the rest becomes unstable and explodes."
Despite the fear and all that was happening, Quylla immediately stopped sobbing. She had just realized that it was the first time they actually touched not through the uniform.
Lith's skin had a pleasant smell of soap, still bronze coloured from the years spent hunting in the wild under the sun.
"Would you manage to close them if they contained less energy?"
Quylla nodded, while Lith turned around, facing the nearest crack and flooding it with darkness magic.
- "I have no clue about light magic, but after much thinking I'm quite sure that darkness is pure entropy. No matter what kind of energies a dimensional fissure is composed off, if I'm right the darkness will eat them, until they become weak enough for Quylla to fix them."
"And if you are wrong?" Solus voice was worried like when they had faced the Scorpicore.
"In that case I suck at science as much as I do at magic. Here goes everything!" –